Ready…Set…Stress!

Come my daughter’s fall swim season, I also have another job, one that’s voluntary by definition and anything but in reality. The beginning of the season gives slacker moms, like me, unbridled moping reign. Wait a minute, way too many big words to define what’s really going on here. We, the parents, basically get to sit around, eat candy from the vending machine, and occasionally glance toward the pool, unless the People magazine, the WiFi situation, or HGTV reruns in the lobby prevail and entertain us during the glorious, one-hour downtime. Yes, I know, sad. I’d rather sip a latte at Barnes & Nobles or, heck, get my nails done, but my reality isn’t exactly sponsored by a TV show. On the contrary – it’s my reality.

Several weeks into the season, the parents finally get their work/volunteer assignments. “Yippee!” I had applied for the “zookeeper” job; a pretty cushy gig by definition since I already keep a small herd of monkeys at home – the elementary and pre-school kind. The job description appealed to me. How bad can it be to “herd” a group of swimmers between events? Sure beats manning the bake table, which requires a cool head and flawless math skills (not my forte). Unless they’d agree to rip off customers by instituting a uniform pricing structure, the subtle variances between a bag of M&Ms and a bowl of homemade chili are too much for me to calculate on the spot, with swimmers and parents scuttling about. I have enough pressure at work, thank you.

Feeling superbly confident in my qualifications as a zookeeper, I was shocked to learn that the position had already been filled. Now, these kinds of arrangements don’t come with a LinkedIn network (note to self: look into registering a swim team social network to swap job opportunities, recommendations, and ongoing training). There is no Plan B, no “who do you know” string pulling, and not even an “opt out” contingency plan. I was assigned place judge instead, a job that requires dead-on eyeballing capabilities. Don’t get me wrong, I take this stuff very seriously, which is why I mope so much during preseason, drinking soda, eating candy, chatting, reading, and watching lobby TV, sometimes all at the same time. As a newbie to this gig, I dove right in and listened in earnest to the instructions during orientation, while the pros on the team, aka parents less inclined to embrace vending machine-sponsored happiness during preseason, merely poked their heads in and excused themselves seconds later to do their jobs with the efficiency of a fighter pilot. The instructions for my new job made sense, but I had the official repeat them twice more for good measure, as if the whole competitive event would fall apart without my assigned job.

Ten minutes later, I found myself clutching a clip board and heading for the pool to judge swimmers’ placements in individual events. Place judge basically acts as a third line of defense in case the stop watches fail or the touch pads malfunction. Still, I felt like the new guy in the office with a truckload of responsibility on the first day. Not wanting to disappoint, or worse, get fired (by whom?) from my volunteer position, I set out to make an impression and put all the previous place judges to shame! I had visions of my name on a plaque in the lobby dancing in my head. Honest…Fair…Dead-on Judgment. I was ready to take on the pool and kick some butt, with my flip-flop-clad feet planted firmly on the slippery, wet tile.

One of the more senior volunteers occasionally checked in for progress updates. These brief chit-chats completely derailed me though, and I could only guess at which little hand in which lane touched the pad first (the little swimmers have a tendency to all arrive at precisely the same time in a big cluster). This is not exactly the Olympics, so why then are these races so darn close and dramatic? Well, in short, I failed miserably several times. I reported back to the higher ranking volunteers and joked about getting fired (lots of nervous laughter on my part). After four hours, I finally figured out why my hands where so sore; I had been gripping the clip board as if it was a life preserver. I had scribbled down lane placements in incomprehensible gibberish, exposing my lack of qualifications for the job and bad eyesight.

Why do I take these things to seriously? Maybe it’s because my daughter is watching me from the sidelines. She’s the athlete, I’m just the over-achieving, under-qualified volunteer who can handle a tough task at the office, but can’t eyeball a 25-feet dash to the finish line poolside. She’s the one who jumps headfirst into the pool, swims her heart out for 45 seconds, and returns five events later for another race, while having fun with her fellow swimmers between events. I have always prided myself in being way too jaded to take this stuff too seriously. Yet I ran with the job like it came with a client charge number.

What really matters is for my daughter to have fun, if she sees me bee-bopping around poolside in the process, that’s even better. A quick kiss, an embarrassing, scream-my-head-off “go!” from the sidelines, even while working/volunteering, bring it all back to what it really is – a parent’s ability to help out. And since there’s no parents’ performance review at the end of the season, and they can’t really afford to fire volunteers for being human (and making some mistakes), I might as well have as much fun with it as my daughter, who once again reminded me about the simple pleasures in life.

By Marion KaseMarion Kase is a working mother who lives, plays, and, well, works out in the burbs. She captures a dirty sock laundry list of mundane, sometimes hair-pulling observations, as seen from the brim of her coffee cup, for all the unsung heroes in our wonderful community on her blog, Helicopter-Caterpillar.